College of Arts and Letters, Stevens Institute of Technology, and the IEEE History Center
The 200th anniversary year of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus has drawn worldwide interest in revisiting the novel’s themes. What were those themes and what is their value to us in the early twenty-first century? Mary Shelley was rather vague as to how Victor, a young medical student, managed to reanimate a person cobbled together from parts of corpses. The imagination of the novel’s readership outfitted Victor’s laboratory with the chemical and electrical technologies that brought the creature to life. In what ways have new tools of science and technology served as “elixirs of life” since the age of Frankenstein? This conference will explore these themes with a broad interdisciplinary perspective. The conference will open with the Charles E. Robinson Memorial Lecture by Susan Wolfson of Princeton University and will close with a plenary lecture by Rosalind Williams of MIT.